James Surls was the subject of one of my earliest posts. He came to Lawndale and gave a talk about the founding of Lawndale as a place for artistic production. It was an inspiring talk, but it made me feel like I had missed out on a critical moment of Houston’s art world.
Surls came to the University of Houston to be a professor of sculpture at the University of Houston in 1976. Right from the start, he made Splendora his and his wife Charmaine Locke’s home. According to Collision, Locke and Surls bought 22 acres of mostly undeveloped land which is where I went last weekend for their rural compound. In 1976, it must have been far from Houston—by now, the suburbs have metastasized to come pretty close to Splendora, but it still feels fairly rural, or at least, exurban.
In December 1978, the Art and Architecture building on the campus of UH was struck by lightning and burned down. The art department was really screwed, but fortunately UH had a building a couple of miles off-campus on Lawndale Street. This became the Lawndale Art Annex and was home to the art department for the next few years. Surls took this ball and ran with it. Lawndale became a locus of art-making in Houston, and the students who passed through it spread its grassroots, DIY ethos wherever they went. For example, CSAW was a direct offshoot of Lawndale, founded when some art students realized they were going to be kicked out of Lawndale (for the crime of graduating). When Impractical Spaces by Pete Gershon was published last year, I tried to chart all the institutional offshoots of Lawndale.
But more important are the artists that were taught by Surls or influenced by him, and what they did. That is partly why Surls and Locke collaborated with Jack Massing and Xandra Eden to put on an outdoor sculpture exhibit at the Locke Surls Center for Art and Nature in Splendora.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a bower is “a pleasant place under the branches of a tree in a wood or garden.” In the exhibit, there are 13 bowers—little clearings—with one or more temporary sculptural installation in each. It had rained the morning I came, so the bowers were a little muddy, but aside from that, the weather was perfect.
As I walked among the bowers, I was reminded of my trip to Storm King, the huge outdoor sculpture museum in the Hudson Valley just north of New York City. I visited it in 2019. As I strolled the expansive grounds of Storm King (500 hilly acres), I thought why doesn’t some eccentric Texan zillionaire endow something like this in Texas? Surls and Locke are not zillionaires, and their 22 acres in the steamy piney woods of East Texas are quite different from Storm King, but this exhibit feels like a micro-Storm King. Unlike Storm King, this is not a permanent exhibit, but it will be on view for a long time. You can see it Saturdays, 11 am – 4 pm through October 28, 2023
So let’s take a stroll through the bowers. Each bower was off a trail and labeled with a small green sign, with the name of the piece and everyone who worked on it. This was nice; not only was the artist listed, but everyone who helped the artist as well. Assistants never get this kind of acknowledgement in visual art (unlike movies).
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